AML Awards 1980 – 1989

YEAR

RECIPIENT

TITLE

AWARD

CITATION

1989

Signature Books

Editing & Publishing

The awards committee stated, “Over the years Signature books has been a strong and generous friend to the AML by donating to the AML’s awards and by publishing so many books to which those awards have gone — and more, a friend to all writers and readers of all forms of Mormon literature, by publishing and reprinting much, if not most, of the best we now have.”

1989

Sunstone

Editing & Publishing

In giving this award, the judges stated, “As the only publication regularly printing Mormon drama, Sunstone performs a valuable service. For this heroic and unremunerative undertaking, the AML wishes to honor the magazine and its editors, Scott Kenney, Allen Roberts, Peggy Fletcher, and Elbert Peck, themselves characters in the continuing drama of Mormon literature.”

1989

Dennis Clark

“Mormon Poetry Now!: The State of the Art”

Criticism

Judges felt that “These four essays offer a remarkable review of contemporary poetry by Mormon writers that is at once enthusiastic, very knowledgeable, informative, and balanced.”

1989

Michael Hicks

Mormonism and Music: A History

Criticism

The citation for this award stated, “In this first scholarly narrative of Mormon music, the style rings with passion and poetry and the conclusions challenge, probe, and provoke.”

1989

Emma Lou Thayne

As for Me and My House

Personal Essay

Of this collection, the judges said, “These sixteen meditations on housekeeping and homemaking evoke an intensely lived life in a simple yet richly suggestive style.”

1989

Susan Elizabeth Howe

“Things in the Night Sky”

Poetry

In awarding this prize, the awards committee said, “This poet reworks the world we knew we know and makes it ours to speak, of giving us the challenge of a new world, formed after the old one where we used to live.”

1989

Pauline Mortensen

Back Before the World Turned Nasty

Short Fiction

Judges stated, “Discovering the voice of these splendid stories is like finding an arrowhead, so carefully formed that it seems an aspect of nature, as rough and flint-hard as reality.”

1989

Judith Freeman

The Chinchilla Farm

Novel

Reviewing this novel, the awards committee stated, “In this novel the protagonist’s journey from the Mormonism and Utah of her childhood into the perplexities and shifting alliances of the larger West is rendered with sensitivity and sympathy.”

1988

John Bennion

A Court of Love; A House of Order; Dust

Short Fiction

“A Court of Love,” Sunstone 12.2 (March 1988): 30-38. / “A House of Order.” Dialogue 21.3 (Autumn 1988): 129-48. / “Dust,” Ascent 14.1 (1988): 1-10. In three finely-honed stories — each appearing in a separate journal and one of them the 1986 D.K. Brown Fiction Contest winner — John Bennion squarely confronts the age’s challenges to the Mormon world view and way of life. Whether themselves transgressors and uncertain believers or their distressed kin, Bennion’s protagonists reflect both the conscience of sensitive, good people and sophistication and vulnerability of real twentieth-century human beings. As in much significant fiction, the common objective correlative and concrete occasion of their inner struggle — till now largely skirted by Mormon writers — is sexual distress. The world of insular communality, agrarian values, strong family and marital ties, an accepting if narrow view of sexuality, dogmatic convictions, and individual sacrifice is — in each of their minds — arrestingly opposed to one of rootless personal autonomy, self-centered professionalism, guilt-ridden hedonism, cosmopolitanism, and underlying dread of nuclear destruction (closely paralleling the conventionally religious anticipation of Armageddon). This juxtaposition, dynamic and kaleidoscopic, creates a refracting lens in which Bennion’s Mormon readers can easily discern their own uneasy ethnocentric selves. His portraits urge that the choices before us were never more subtle, all-determining, or difficult. In its culturally informed context, Bennion’s psychological realism should enhance Mormons’ self-understanding and others’ recognition of their intrinsic humanity. John Bennion’s is a talent of great promise — one to be watched with thanks and applause.

1988

Dennis Marden Clark

Tinder: answer might be. With an almost Augustinian Dry Poems

Poetry

Dennis Marden Clark’s first collection of poems provides an occasion to honor him as one of the best of younger Mormon poets. He is not only an exceptional poet, but has served the cause of poetry — and of Mormon letters — as a fine editor (of poetry for Sunstone), anthologist (of a forthcoming collection of Mormon poetry), and critic and bibliographer. And he has now founded his own press for publishing poetry. Tinder provides us, in a lovingly chapbook, twenty-one of Dennis Clark’s best poems. They reveal the great range of his subject matter, from a sonnet for his daughter’s baptism, to an elegy for his brother’s deaf ear, to an ode for his father’s garden, from immersion in a glacial lake to utter rejection of a nuclear doings on Jackass Flats, Nevada. They show the qualities of his voice, from lyric elegance to down home Orem vernacular, from engaging what he calls the “soil you have banked against your ruin” to “one good joke to get us through today.” His work is indeed tinder for our burning.

1988

Ann Edwards Cannon

Cal Cameron by Day, Spider-Man by Night

Novel

Although aimed at an adolescent market and thus simple in style and resonant with the idiom of the young, this Delacorte Award-winning first novel’s insight and depth, its acute rendition of and wise commentary on the conflicts of the young, make it a novel for adults as well. In the author’s skillful hands the ordinary becomes extraordinary. She has created a protagonist of high school age in whom an emerging tolerance and decency triumph over the clannish values of his peers; who learns to understand the sometimes not-so-understanding adults around him and to affirm the outcasts from his own age group; who learns, most notably, to discount the fear of eccentricity. “So we do all sorts of things to show how superior we are,” Cal Cameron recognizes; “We treat [the eccentric] like they’re not even real — ignore them, laugh at them, trick them into singing private songs.” And Cal moves in an authentic contemporary social context: young and old, the personalities with whom he interacts are alive and credible. With quiet eloquence and unflagging perspicacity, the author has revealed, explained and judged attitudes and motives. Although none of her characters are expressly Latter-day Saints, they exist in the familiar setting of Provo, Utah and may easily be construed as Mormons who display, not the peculiarities of their faith, but the traits of a universal humanity.

1988

Karin Anderson England

“The Man at the Chapel”

Personal Essay

Dialogue 21.4 (Winter 1988): 133-41 Mormon literature includes sizeable amounts of serious fiction — especially stories and story-cycles — about missionary experience. And the missionary homecoming talk must be one of our most stable and perennial oral narrative genres, with conventions nearly as fixed as those for public prayer or testimony: the mission is “the best two years” of the elder’s or sister’s life, and the tale of those years must arrive at a faith-promoting sum of successful conversion stories, in which the missionary serves mainly as a fibre-optic conduit for the signals of the Spirit. So we sit and wonder, What is it really like? Karin England’s “The Man at the Chapel” offers us a taste of what a forthright severity of self-scrutiny, it searches experiences that won’t easily add up, hard cases of the wandering and lost, the poor, the beaten, the dubious in spirit; cases as tough as the one that face Bartleby’s employer, and of less certain ending. And though at its end it still fears and trembles, her essay moves from harrowing toward healing.

1988

Clinton F. Larson

Selected Poems of Clinton F. Larson

Poetry

The poetry of Clinton Larson has been honored before by The Association for Mormon Letters as the best Mormon poetry in a given year, and has been discussed in a Symposium session. This year, prompted by the publication of his Selected Poems, edited by David Evans, we honor Clinton Larson for forty years of outstanding contributions to Mormon Letters. He has been praised as one of America’s finest Western poets, called the first real Mormon poet, the father of modern Mormon writers that emerged in the 1960s and forged new combinations of honesty and faith, formal skill and concern for the truth of Mormon experience. We honor him for his role as a pioneer, both in conceiving and helping to found the first modern journal of Mormon letter, Brigham Young University Studies, and in setting new standards for Mormon writers in the quality and content of his poetry. We honor him for the splendid lyrics that have appeared regularly throughout his career and are gathered in Selected Poems. And we honor him that in his fifth decade as a publishing poet he continues to produce good work and to nurture and challenge us all.

1988

Wayne C. Booth

The Company We Keep: An Ethics of Fiction

Criticism

Wayne Booth’s The Company We Keep is not specifically, not doctrinally a work of “Mormon criticism”; yet it is the work of a Mormon critic who has always acknowledged the roots of his most enduring values, his persistent sense of the world and what is worthy in it, as first nourished in Mormon country and community — in a place some still call “American Fark.” In the present situation of literary criticism, which often can seem desiccated by skeptical polemics rather than fertile with plurality, Booth argues learnedly, lucidly, generously, and delicately for not just the relevance but the necessity and centrality of ethical criticism, and demonstrates the athletic complexity of its action, as if his life — as if all our lives — depended on it. And he persuades us that our lives do indeed depend on our alert, quickened ethical relations to those who offer us the community at large, and the smaller community of Mormon letters within it, is one that promises (or threatens) to keep on giving. We thank him headily, glad of his company.

1988

Levi S. Peterson

Juanita Brooks: Mormon Woman Historian

Biography

Levi Peterson’s study of Mormonism’s first modern — and most heroically self-made — historian is already acclaimed as the winner of the David W. and Beatrice C. Evans Biography Award, given by the Mountain West Center for Regional Studies, and readers along the Wasatch Front and elsewhere applaud its richly enthralling, highly readable story of the life of a great woman, a fiercely loving and fearlessly critical maverick riding the edge of the herd as long as body and brain would endure. In its breadth and depth of research, its generous and judicious use of that research, and its sky-wide, canyon-deep, native-born sympathy for Juanita Brooks and for the native earth that nourished her and the implanted Mormon community whose history and dynamics she used her life to comprehend, Levi Peterson’s Juanita Brooks: Mormon Woman Historian honors its subject by emulation, and raises the bar a sizeable notch higher for all who will yet write the stories of Mormon lives.

1988

William A. Wilson

Honorary Lifetime Membership

1988

Terry Tempest Williams

Honorary Lifetime Membership

1988

Laurel T. Ulrich

Honorary Lifetime Membership

1988

Emma Lou Thayne

Honorary Lifetime Membership

1988

Douglas Thayer

Honorary Lifetime Membership

1988

Steven P. Sondrup

Honorary Lifetime Membership

1988

Levi S. Peterson

Honorary Lifetime Membership

1988

Hugh Nibley

Honorary Lifetime Membership

1988

Gerald N. Lund

Honorary Lifetime Membership

1988

John S. Harris

Honorary Lifetime Membership

1988

Mary L. Bradford

Honorary Lifetime Membership

1988

Wayne Booth

Honorary Lifetime Membership

1988

Elouise Bell

Honorary Lifetime Membership

1987

Bruce W. Jorgensen

“Romantic Lyric Form and Western Mormon Experience in the Stories of Douglas Thayer”

Criticism

According to the awards committee, “this article advances the thesis that Thayer both adapts the Romantic lyric as a usable part of his literary heritage and at the same time subverts it because of his Mormon heritage; the critic skillfully and gracefully proceeds to demonstrate this thesis using two stories: “Under the Cottonwoods” and “Opening Day.” This distinguished article not only provides a profound perspective on the contribution of the writer of the stories, Douglas Thayer, but also offers a powerful paradigm for further critical examination of Mormon literature. In doing so, Bruce Jorgensen’s article makes a significant breakthrough in Mormon criticism and our understanding of the Mormon literary imagination.”

1987

Mary Lythgoe Bradford

Leaving Home

Personal Essay

An excerpt from this citation states, “The culmination of Mary Bradford’s twenty years as an indefatigable practitioner and promoter of the personal essay, Leaving Home could with equal appropriateness be titled Going Home. The twenty-two essays treat from a distinctive point of view the universal experiences of growing up, moving out, and growing older, of losing parents and gaining children and seeing those children leaving home in their turn. Informed throughout by the author’s characteristic insight, humor, and directness, Leaving Home is a significant contribution to Mormon letters.”

1987

Robert A. Christmas

“Self-Portrait as Brigham Young”

Poetry

1987

Darrell Spencer

A Woman Packing a Pistol

Short Fiction

The judges stated, “This collection of eleven stories—a set of virtuoso improvisations by a writer with exceptional technical skill, a keen ear for speech, and an irrepressible delight in language for its own sake—presents us with a problematic case: that of a Mormon writer of serious short fiction who does not obviously write about Mormon characters or (except peripherally) the Mormon milieu. These stories test the powers and limits of a contemporary perilous terrain for the Mormon imagination, a planet of genuine surprise. They enter this terrain by an investment of loving but unintrusive moral imagination that shows their kinship with the family of classic short stories from Chekhov to Raymond Carver: they think speak, and feel ‘in keeping with [the] spirit’ of their characters, and they ask the reader for an equally risky investment.”

1987

Linda Sillitoe

Sideways to the Sun

Novel

The citation for this award states, “This is the first fully contemporary Mormon novel: the first novel of substantial fictive skill and moral weight to deal, in the immediate present, with a substantial contemporary problem, abandonment and single parenthood, that afflicts Mormons in unique as well as universal ways. It confronts, in anguished and anguishing detail, the central paradox, the fundamental opposition, that we are forever separate individuals but forever dependent on relationships and commitments for individual fulfillment and joy. Women who read this novel say they cannot stop reading until they have lived through Megan’s pilgrimage with her. Perhaps more men will be saying the same thing.”

1986

Brent Watts

Marty’s World

Children’s Literature

1986

Steve Wunderlie

Marty’s World

Children’s Literature

1986

Myrtle McDonald

No Regrets: The Life of Carl A. Carlquist

Personal and Family History Book

1986

Paul M. Edwards

“When Will the Little Woman Come Out of the House?” (John Whitmer Historical Association Journal)

Personal and Family History Essay

1986

Michael Fillerup

“Hozohoogoo Nanina Doo” (Dialogue)

Short Fiction

1986

Dennis Marden Clark

“Sunwatch” (Literature and Belief)

Poetry

1986

Susan Taber

“In Jeopardy Every Hour” (Dialogue)

Personal Essay

1986

Dennis Rasmussen

The Lord’s Question

Religious Literature

1986

Levi Peterson

The Backslider

Novel

1985

Steven Walker

Seven Ways of Looking at Susanna

Criticism

1985

Edward Geary

Goodbye to Poplarhaven

Personal Essay

1985

Emma Lou Thayne

Poetry

For specific poems unnamed.

1985

Neal C. Chandler

“Benediction”

Short Fiction

1985

Herbert Harker

Circle of Fire

Novel

1984

Carol Lynn Pearson

Special Award

Carol Lynn Pearson received a special award “for her sustained and distinguished contributions, over two decades, to a variety of genres—the novel, the short story, poetry, drama and musical drama, humor, and the essay, all of which reflect the ethos of a thoughtful and committed Latter-day Saint.”

1984

Scott Kenney

Editing & Publishing

This award is given “for [Kenney’s] outstanding efforts in fostering the publication of Mormon literature. His willingness to risk publication and republication of fine literary works, despite the likelihood of lower sales, has heartened many authors and readers alike.”

1984

Eugene England

A Dialogue with Myself: Personal Essays on Mormon Experience

Personal Essay

1984

Orson Scott Card

Saints, A Woman of Destiny

Novel

[Originally published as A Woman of Destiny and later republished by Deseret Book under the title Saints.]

1983

Neal A. Maxwell

Sermon

An excerpt from this citation stated, “Elder Maxwell, of the Quorum of the Twelve, is endowed with an exceptional ability to translate personal inspiration and revelation into sermons which in turn evoke such inspiration and revelation in the lives of his listeners. Perhaps it is not the duty of laymen to differentiate publicly among the clearly inspired sermons of the General Authorities or others, but it cannot be considered as speaking ill of the Lord’s anointed to applaud and commend the sustained sensitivity and inspired excellence of Elder Maxwell’s addresses to the Saints through his career as the Church Commissioner of Education, as a General Authority, and as an Apostle. His sermons, always carefully crafted, soar from their grounding in the Standard Works on images and cadences which reach out and move the whole range of Latter-day Saints as he teaches them concepts often taught but ne’er so well expressed.”

1983

The Editors of Exponent II

Editing & Publishing To honor the tenth anniversary of the founding of the journal, the judges acknowledge this publication: “In an era in which Latter-day Saint women have been seeking to redefine their relationships with their church, Exponent II has blessed a generation of Mormon women with the opportunity to read and write, from within a framework of faith and the desire to believe, for and about the Latter-day Saint woman. Though the journal has opened its pages to a variety of excellent expression from across the whole gamut of faith, its editors have deftly reminded it readers, through selection and encouragement, of the necessity of sustained commitment to self-improvement centered in gospel principles fostered by the Restoration. Exponent II has thus remained an exponent not only of women, and particularly Mormon women, but of the Gospel of Jesus Christ. We commend the several editors and their associates not only for keeping the torch lit, but for keeping it brightly fueled and well-passed over a significant decade which has meant so much to the growth of women within the Church and thus to the moral and spiritual refinement of the Church itself.”

1983

Jack Weyland

Special Award

Speaking of his contribution to Mormon literature, the awards committee stated, “Weyland’s gift for lively narrative, his ability to touch the lives and hearts of young readers, and his skill at subordinating a good moral to good prose and an exciting story have long delighted young and old readers of The New Era. And such novels as Charly, Sam, The Reunion, and Pepper Tide, as well a collection of short stories, have kept young people reading his work, which has thus supplanted or at least supplemented the Hardy Boys, Nancy Drew, sci fi, and even television. Jack Weyland has blessed a generation with good stories well told, set in a real world peopled with the good and not-so-good but fathered by and centered in a caring God. Many of our young people are cutting their literary teeth on Weyland—and we should all be grateful.”

1983

Levi S. Peterson

Greening Wheat: Fifteen Mormon Short Stories

Editing & Publishing

The awards committee said, “This collection goes far toward proving Peterson’s thesis that ‘good stories are appearing among the Mormons, greening like wheat in a Utah spring.’ Centering in what Peterson has called ‘the possibility of wrong behavior,’ these stories variously examine the tension between Sainthood as fact and Sainthood as aspiration, between belief and doubt, and between expected blessings and the traumas of reality. Peterson has performed an important service for Mormon letters by collecting ‘an abundant sampling of [Mormon] experience—comedy and tragedy, ecstasy and disillusionment, restraint and sensuality, heroism and failure, romance and defiance.’ The Association for Mormon Letters commends Levi S. Peterson for making thee hitherto generally inaccessible stories available to a larger LDS and non-LDS audience.”

1983

Clifton Holt Jolley

“Selling the Chevrolet: A Moral Exercise”

Humor

The judges stated, “Jolley’s well-written, lighthearted, yet serious sequel to Eugene England’s earlier article “Blessing the Chevrolet” demonstrates the power of humorous writing in reinforcing and promoting the Mormon world view. Positing a purposeful, God-centered universe, Jolley, whose delightful column in the Deseret News has gathered a large and appreciative audience, plays in this article on the incongruity between skepticism and faith—and refreshingly allows skepticism to take it on the chin from an unassuming but confident (and surprised) faith.”

1983

Calvin Grondahl

Freeway to Perfection

Humor

Discussing these three volumes, the awards committee stated, “Expressively drawn, wonderfully incisive, and always witty, Grondahl’s cartoons graphically surpass Mark Twain’s criteria for humor: They do not ‘professedly teach,’ nor do they ‘professedly preach,’ but in their inimitable way they teach and preach, as must all good humor, and thus are instructive to Latter-day Saints and non-Mormons alike about Mormon culture and society. Mr. Grondahl points a gentle, sympathetic, but probing finger at individual and institutional Mormon foibles, conceits, fancies, flaws, and sacred cows, and thus illuminates the gap between magnificent LDS aspirations and often-bumbling Mormon realities. In his work, which is a remarkable contribution to Mormon Americana, Grondahl performs a great service and thereby awakens among all of us a restorative and therapeutic laughter.”

1983

Eugene England

“The Dawning of a Brighter Day: Mormon Literature after 150 Years”

Criticism

[First delivered as a Charles Redd Lecture. Also published in After 150 Years: The Latter-day Saints in Sesquicentennial Perspective, ed. Thomas G. Alexander and Jessie L. Embry, (Midvale, Utah: Charles Redd Center for Western Studies, 1983. 97-146).] In awarding this citation, the awards committee stated, “Speaking as one having authority and not of the scribes, England outlines, in this landmark article, the significant accomplishments of Mormon literature through three distinctive periods and suggests, if not a credo, the a near-credo for writers—and readers—of Mormon literature; and his attached bibliography has become a point of departure for all who would be knowledgeable in Mormon literary scholarship and England’s article is a milestone in Mormon literary scholarship and yet another milestone in his career of major contributions to Mormon literature, a career which has thus far led him from founding and editing Dialogue to the presidency of the Association for Mormon Letters and his profession as a teacher of Mormon letters at Brigham Young University. In this article, as in so many of his works, England again reminds us why his name has become synonymous with Mormon literature.”

The awards committee stated, “In these poems this gifted young poet writes of simple but significant human experience in a controlled style which is vibrant with color and humor and joy. We commend her for these auspicious beginnings and, echoing the words of Ralph Waldo Emerson to Walt Whitman, we greet her at the beginning of a bright and promising literary career.”

1983

Clinton F. Larson

“A Romaunt of the Rose: A Tapestry of Poems”

Poetry

The judges stated, “In this remarkable sequence of outstanding poems, Larson displays poetic versatility and power in portraying deeply Christian faith in a variety of styles. Throughout this tapestry, Larson carefully weaves the Rose of Christ in styles ranging from Dante and Spenser to Herrick and Milton; he captures their styles brilliantly, yet adds his own touches, shaped by profound faith in the Word and the Word made flesh. These ten poems, brilliantly conceived and executed, are but the more recent publications in Larson’s ever-growing corpus of fine poems which assure his position as the premier Mormon poet.”

1983

Thomas F. Rogers

God’s Fools: Plays of the Mitigated Conscience

Drama

[Also published by Eden Hill; Midvale, Utah: Distributed by Signature Books, 1983.] According to the awards committee, “All of these plays center on two fundamental themes: ‘the consequences of unrighteous dominion and our concomitant need for what the Romans called “filial piety.”‘ Rogers’s characters confront the necessity of making strong moral choices which, when made, will forever after alter relationships with individuals and institutions. Posing difficult questions and challenges, Rogers unshrinkingly probes the consequences of standing for Truth in a world of ambiguities. In offering these plays, Rogers’s contribution to Mormon letters is inestimable, and he joins therewith a small group of distinguished LDS playwrights in offering to thoughtful Latter-day Saints moral dramas which resound more with the echoes of Gethsemane and Carthage Jail than those of Added Upon and the Ward Road Show tradition. In this volume, Rogers has stirred Mormon drama to a giant leap forward.”

1983

Levi S. Peterson

The Canyons of Grace

Short Fiction

In awarding this prize, the judges said, “Peterson demonstrates in these six stories an artistic versatility ranging from the profoundly symbolic to the delightfully comic. Peterson sets his stories in a moral Mormon universe in which his characters often struggle with their Mormon vision, cope sensitively with their guilt, and seek for redemption. With this brilliant collection, Peterson has raised the Mormon short story to a new level of artistic excellence and sophistication.”

1983

Douglas H. Thayer

Summer Fire

Novel

The judges stated, “In this important work Thayer traces the confrontation of Owe, an unusually devout sixteen year old Mormon boy, with a usually hostile spiritual environment, and achieves, en route to Owen’s humanizing, a refreshing human universality and reaffirmation of life and the necessity of ‘opposition in all things’—all without lapsing into the didacticism which has so often plagued Mormon fiction. We commend Mr. Thayer, not only for his careful craftsmanship, the expectation for which he established in his collection of short stories, Under the Cottonwoods, but also for his imaginative and creative examination of Mormon themes which consistently strike universal chords.”

1981

George S. Tate

“The Typology of the Exodus Pattern in the Book of Mormon”

Criticism

The awards committee felt that this essay “continues the ongoing project of literary interpretation of Latter-day Saint scripture by unfolding further dimensions of typology in the Book of Mormon and thus showing its close structure and thematic connections with the Bible.”

1981

Linda Sillitoe

“Lullaby in the New Year”;”Demons”

Poetry and Short Fiction

In making this award, the prize committee called Sillitoe’s work “a finely crafted sonnet and a mature short story which portray the tenderness and terror of Mormon women’s experience with acute insight and feeling, and which together demonstrate remarkable literary versatility.”

1981

Robert A. Rees

“Gilead”

Poetry

“Gilead” is described as “a psalm of praise which, by invoking and extending both scriptural and literary tradition, celebrates the providential unity of the world and time under the figure of the living tree.”

1981

Robert A. Christmas

“Another Angel”

Short Fiction

The judges stated that this short story is “a masterfully written story which explores with delicate tact the ambivalence of apostasy and the subtle appeal of faith to the nonbeliever.”

1980

Frank W. Fox

J. Reuben Clark: The Public Years

Biography

According to the judges, “J. Reuben Clark: The Public Years is a biography that moves ‘beyond the adventure of the pioneer epic into the institutionalism of the twentieth century, beyond the isolation of the Great Basin into the coexistence with a nation of pluralities, beyond eulogy into candor. All this is done in clear but elegant language, creating a new classic in Mormon literature.’”

1980

Linda Sillitoe

“New Voices, New Songs: Contemporary Poems by Mormon Women”

Criticism

The citation for this award stated, “This essay pointed out new trends: ‘women writing about women, seeking identification with a Heavenly Mother, and portraying marriage realistically’ in ‘new voices of individuality and humanness.’”

1980

Emma Lou Thayne

Once in Israel

Poetry

The citation noted that the book invites “the reader to travel from the daily experience of the tourist into the perceptive observations of a humanitarian and into the imagination of a poet. Always there is the movement from the present of daily concern into the past of scripture. Always there is the need to understand coupled with the pleasure of knowing and identifying with Israel and its people.”

1980

Marilyn McMeen Miller Brown

The Earthkeepers

Novel

This historical romance was named “the best work of fiction on a Mormon theme.” Ms. Brown, a Provo poet and novelist, the citation continued, had written “both an informative history of the settlement of Provo, and a full, rich novel about a sensitive and strong woman.”

AML Facebook Feed

The Association for Mormon Letters will present two lifetime achievement awards at the Mormon Scholars in the Humanities Conference Banquet on March 23, held at the BYU Skyroom Restaurant, 6:30-8:30 pm. Lavina Fielding Anderson will be presented with the Smith-Pettit Foundation Award for Outstanding Contribution to Mormon Letters, and Robert Kirby will be presented with the Association for Mormon Letters Lifetime Achievement Award. Both authors will be attending. There will also be one panel dedicated to each awardee as part of the MSH Conference, held in the afternoon of March 23, before the award ceremony. associationmormonletters.org/blog/2018/03/lifetime-achievement-awards-lavina-fielding-anderson-an...... See MoreSee Less

Kim Östman reviews Hans H Mattsson and Christina Andersson Hanke's memoir, “Sökte sanning – fann tvivel” (Sought Truth, Found Doubt). Mattsson is a former member of the Third Quorum of the Seventy, who has been public with his transition away from belief in Mormonism. "Latter-day Saint life and faith is portrayed with great skill throughout the book, and nobody is portrayed flippantly or vindictively. Despite comments that remind the reader of the book’s ultimate message, its tone is respectful throughout, and it is abundantly clear that the authors have a place in their hearts for their former faith and their experiences within it. Mr. Mattsson appears to have arrived at a healthy vantage point from which to evaluate his life journey, which is demonstrated especially in the epilogue, written in first-person style." associationmormonletters.org/blog/reviews/current-reviews/mattsson-and-hanke-sokte-sanning-fans-t...... See MoreSee Less

Segullah interviews Susan Howe. "In my student days, I was repeatedly warned against didactic poetry, poetry whose purpose is to convince the reader of something. I still believe that to be a good warning; a didactic purpose keeps a poem from being art and reduces it to a kind of propaganda. On the other hand, the patriarchal literary establishment has, during my generation and earlier, prevented women from examining their own experience by calling women’s perspectives limited and partial, which of course they are, just as men’s perspectives are limited and partial. As a student I had to learn to read with a male perspective; now men also have to learn to read with a female perspective. I think this is altogether admirable and creates far greater opportunities for men and women to understand each other. I was also taught that if you know the end of your poem when you begin to write it, it’s already a dead poem, and I believe that’s also true. Poems are about exploring, examining, and learning where the poem wants to go, not deciding that beforehand. I hope that’s evident in my poems, particularly when I examine such subjects as Mother in Heaven." segullah.org/daily-special/interview-featured-writer-susan-elizabeth-howe/... See MoreSee Less